Ali Velshi on Fighting for Democracy
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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. On the show, I have my good friend, Ali Belshi. He is an anchor on MSNBC who is always on the front line of every story. He's on the show today to talk about...

a wide range of issues from democracy to the Gaza protests. Who are these low information voters that we're talking about all the time? Immigration. And then we end with a positive prediction on the Fed. Ali has a new book out called Small Acts of Courage, and we're going to talk about that as well, about his family and their fight for democracy.

But first, if I could recommend that you read one thing this week, it would be a Time magazine article called How Far Trump Would Go. And it lays out exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Trump sat down with journalist Eric Cordelessa.

And they had an 80 minute conversation. And I know you hear a lot of this and that from Trump, like, oh, I'm going to be a dictator from day one or I'm going to deport everybody. I mean, there's a lot out there. And it seems like he's constantly making outlandish comments on the trail or truth social. And they often contradict each other. And sometimes

the press doesn't cover it at all. It almost feels like the information is siloed going directly to his supporters because it's not into the mainstream press. Well, this is an opportunity to read exactly where Trump stands on all of these issues and what his next term will look like. Here's an example of some of the stuff that he says. He's asked whether states should monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten abortion that violates a ban. Trump's

Trump says, quote, I think they might do that. Again, you'll have to speak to the individual states. Yeah. And whether there might be political violence after the 2024 election, he says, quote, if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election. Yeah, I know. Yeah.

on using the military to deport migrants who cross illegally. He says, while they aren't civilians, these are people that aren't legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country. So it's really a conversation about everything, including whether he wants to pardon the people who participated in the January 6th attack. So like I said, if you read one thing, it takes 26 minutes, but it's worth your time. And the Trump team is promoting it. So they're clearly proud of everything he says and they stand by it.

Ali, thanks so much for coming on the show. I'm really excited to continue reading your book.

Small Acts of Courage, A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy. Everybody needs to go out and get it. It's kind of like a memoir about your family and how throughout the generations have sought democracy all over the world. And you've been activists. It's a really amazing story, including your father was aligned with Gandhi at one point. But what's the story with that? So my great grandfather and Gandhi were...

associated with each other in South Africa. They were from the same part of India and they used an accountant in common who introduced them and said, you guys might be interested. My great-grandfather was a small businessman. Gandhi was a lawyer. They both arrived at the turn of the century in South Africa. When Gandhi would go to talk to negotiate with people in the government, he lived in Johannesburg and the government was in Pretoria, which today it's a

like an hour drive, but back then it was a two-day journey. Gandhi would stay with my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather had a horse-drawn carriage, so that's how Gandhi would get around. They were talking one day, and this was in 1910, and Gandhi says to my great-grandfather, I would like your son, this is my grandfather who was seven years old at the time, to be part of this ashram that I'm building, a commune.

And Gandhi wanted to build a commune because he felt that people didn't have the courage to fight apartheid or to fight for their rights because, because people are busy, they're doing things. And so he wanted them to be trained to,

in this commune to sort of have very few things in life so that you were able to fight injustice without fear of losing stuff. So my grandfather became his youngest student, which was sort of odd in those times. I mean, a seven-year-old boy, it's now he's going to live and be taught. And my family are Muslims and Gandhi was Hindu. So my great-grandfather said one thing. He said, how will he learn his religion? So Gandhi said, I will learn your religion for you

and teach it to him. So he did. But he grew up with, Gandhi was sort of a pluralist. He was Hindu. So, you know, the students didn't eat any meat or anything like that. They were vegetarians. But he read the Hindu scriptures. He read Christian scriptures. He read Muslim scriptures. He read Jewish scriptures. He was really, to him, pluralism, democracy was an element of pluralism. And so my grandfather spent a few years

on this farm. They grew their own food. They lived with no creature comforts. And the point was, when it comes time for you to go out in the world to fight for justice, to fight for equality, to fight for democracy, they can't take anything from you.

because they can throw you in jail but jail was certainly no less comfortable than how he grew up on that farm so that was the ethos my family grew up it was that ethos of of being able to fight for democracy getting out of your comfort zone to do so and understanding that we live in a pluralistic world and that's the only way it can be and until that fight is finished

it's not finished for you. You may enjoy rights, you may enjoy prosperity, but if those amongst you in society do not, then it's your work to be involved in that fight. And that's what sort of powered me my entire, my life and my career. Totally. And then your family moved on to Kenya and that's where you were born, right? Because the apartheid was so terrible in South Africa. And then you moved on to Canada. And you kind of say like at that point, you sort of took for granted democracy. Yeah.

And especially in the US, you became a citizen in 2013 after being a famous broadcaster. I mean, I remember I was a news assistant in 2008. I probably handed you your scripts then. You don't remember it at CNN. But you were the face of the network. And especially during a really difficult financial period in 2008, when the banks were melting down. I think Jon Stewart had a name for you, like the bald head of doom. Yeah.

What did he call you? Hairless prophet of doom. Hairless prophet of doom. Yeah, exactly. But you were, you know, you were everywhere. And I thought it was interesting to hear that you weren't a citizen. And my mom also lived in this country for a very long time on a green card. She didn't become a citizen until 2001. Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, you can tell the story yourself, but the feeling of it didn't really hit you, the importance until you were there in immigration court about to become a citizen. Yeah.

Yeah, I didn't. What did I need it for? I had a green card. I had a citizenship in Canada. It's fine. I had all the necessary rights except the right to vote, which...

at the time, I didn't think was anybody dependent on, right? One more guy voting in New York is not swinging in any election. So what does it matter? No, it's pretty blue. And I thought to myself, and my colleague at the time, Ashley Banfield, had sort of said it to me because I had said, well, I'm not going to become a citizen because then I'd have to do jury duty. And she took real exception to that. She said, you know, citizenship has its responsibilities. It's not all just rights.

And I didn't realize that. That didn't dawn on me. And even through the process of applying for citizenship, it was kind of rote and whatever. And they sent me a letter and said, show up at the court. So I went down to the court in Lower Manhattan. And then I walk in and I realize...

Like you and I travel on planes and it gets a little old and it's a commute. And then you realize it's somebody on that plane. It's their first plane trip or they're going to meet their loved ones or this is their big gift to themselves. And I'm treating it like it's a bus. That's what citizenship court was to me. I went in thinking this is unimportant, but you can't take your phones in and they give you a little package that has your certificate and all that. And it has a constitution.

So I'm really quite bored because this is taking forever. And I'm reading my constitution. I've read it three times now. First time I've ever sat down to read the American constitution properly. I like everybody else. I know bits and parts of it, but I read the whole thing cover to cover three times. And I thought to myself, this is amazing. It's an amazing document. And there are people in here for whom this really does matter. So it should matter to me.

If the rights and obligations of citizenship are important to my fellow citizens, then they should be important to me. So I really leaned into it. And I realized I didn't have to say that I'm not a Canadian to do it. So I leaned into it. And that was before I even realized how much it would matter to take your obligations as a citizen seriously. We've grown up to think about rights. I grew up in Canada, never thought about it. I didn't have to fight anything. My parents had to fight apartheid. I didn't fight anything.

But then I realized that we actually have to do our part to uphold democracy. And as journalists, I hope we do that anyway. I think of it as a public service, whether you work in your country or another. I mean, I was a foreign correspondent in Belgium for a few years covering the EU. And yeah, I am an EU citizen as well. But I do find that like wherever you're working, whatever audience you speak to, as long as you are delivering news, you know, you know, without fear, you

or favor. Exactly. You're promoting democracy all over the world. And democracy does depend on that

of real information getting out to people and people who are bearing witness and people who are providing their analysis. So, you know, we are in a world where we're in danger of becoming a society of low information voters. And that's really dangerous because democracy depends on people knowing about what's going on and how, you know, how they have to think about the issues. And in my family, because these current events were always front and center,

we always watch the news. That was how you got informed about these things, which is why I got into this business. Everybody else in my family got into politics, but I thought news was important. And that's why you and I are having this conversation today. Okay. So I want to go back to that idea of low information voters, because it's come up in a conversation with me recently. I was talking to a TikTok celebrity. The

The pronouns they go by are they, they does under the desk news. And we were talking about the idea that people who consume news through TikTok are low information voters, but they don't consider themselves to be low information voters. They think that they're going out there. They're high research voters. They're going out and looking to alternative news sources. And that includes, you know, TikTok, which obviously right now there was a law that was just signed last week to ban it. But I was wondering, what do you think about that? Because I was watching TikTok.

these videos under the desk news. She offers very rapid analysis. She's very smart. And I was like, this is, to me, useful. And NBC is now on TikTok. All the major networks are on TikTok. I just kind of feel like we might be misplacing the word low information voter nowadays. I think about it the way a cell phone can identify where you are, right? It needs three towers. If you have three towers, you can find where any three points in space, you can find where anybody is.

And that's how I think of the news, that you need more towers. It doesn't matter what the towers are. You need different sources of information, not one. Because with one, you don't know what's being left out. You don't know. You may not be hearing certain stories, or it'd be interesting to see what other people think news is. So I don't think the idea that one collects their... I mean, you can get all your news from social media, and you could be remarkably informed. I mean,

I mean, people have great analysis. They have great links to things. I think the problem is the bubble, not the social media. It's the idea that we curate things out of our news sources that we're not interested in, and we curate things in that we are interested in.

But you don't do that in a museum. You go to a museum, someone curates for you, but you rely on the idea that they're going to mix it up a little bit. They're going to give you more information than you would get on your own. You wouldn't know to research this animal or this artist or this time in history. That's my concern, that low information voters are people who narrow their input too much and then don't, you know, they lose their critical thinking skills around news. And the algorithm plays to that narrowing so that they never see anything more. And the algorithm does play to that.

but you just have to know that, right? You have to know when you're engaging with TikTok or X or whatever the case is that there are, or Facebook, that there are algorithms at play. So you do have to orchestrate it so that you get more information. That's the main thing. I think you could probably consume all your information digitally and through social media and get a full, full range of information. I don't think where you get it correlates to being a low information voter. I think

Choosing to be a low information voter is what gets you there. The idea that I'm not listening to contrary perspectives. I would suggest that you listen to all sorts of contrary perspectives as long as they're reliable. Our job as journalists are to be reliable. It's not to be opinion free because nobody's opinion free in this world. It is to not gaslight people. It is to give them real information. It is to source it properly. It is to hold power to account. And I write a little bit about this in the book that if we don't tell these stories, sometimes people won't hear them.

But our job is to be responsible to our viewers. The viewers, the listener, the reader's job is to try and consume responsibly so that they can be critical thinkers. It's needed more than ever. Right. I just think there is an audience that has such little faith in traditional news sources. And they go out and find news in their own ways, right? They find it in like...

Reddit circles or they find influencers on TikTok. They like their voices or they do, you know, their own sort of research. Maybe it's a podcast and they wouldn't consider themselves to be low information voters. They're dubbed that. I would agree that they're not. And they're dubbed that in focus groups, though. No, I don't think that's fair. I think that you get different information. I get

Because some of these people who consume their information that way send me those links or send me, hey, watch, this is really interesting. And it's people covering topics that we in mainstream media don't cover. It's perspectives that we don't have. I love that part of it. I love the idea that different voices are offering different perspectives into things. That's not, I don't consider that low information. I agree with you. Yeah, the thing that is interesting though, is that like low information voters, these voters tend to lean right.

That's the one thing that's in common. That's interesting. They don't trust traditional news sources. Democrats, you know, they tend to trust traditional news sources. On the right, they don't. I mean, it makes sense. You've got a presidential candidate and president who has for years been calling the mainstream media fake news, basically creating entire campaigns saying don't trust the media at all. And that's our single biggest challenge. That is literally our single biggest challenge in the media. And that is there are some valid reasons why some people don't trust mainstream media.

And we have to own that, right? We need to be okay with that criticism. I can't sit there and say, that's BS that you don't trust us because we've done everything right for decades. No, we haven't. And we have contributed to polarization. We've done all those things. So all you and I can do

in, in, in, in traditional types of media is be reliable, be able to show our homework to people, tell them where we got this information, how we came to this analysis and, and, and try to earn that trust back. And that's a tough gig to do when you're actually fighting to defend yourself and

To do your job the best way you should be doing it is an extra challenge. But what choice do we have? I know it is feel like you're on the defensive. Yeah. But, you know, if you feel that way, sometimes you act that way and then it becomes self-fulfilling. So I try to accept the fact that there are critics of mainstream media out there. Some of them have valid points. So what do I do to earn your trust every single time I'm on TV?

And I think that helps me be a better journalist. There is also this decline of democracy. The idea that this election democracy is at stake, it definitely resonates with Democrats. We see that in polling, not so much with Republicans. And I just wonder, how strong is this argument? I know that I've talked to people on the Biden campaign. They think that they can use this as an effective argument to drum up voters.

I don't know if people are listing it above inflation or border security or, you know, pocketbook issues. What's your thinking on that? Yeah. And, you know, I talk about immigration a lot in my book because I use sort of the Canadian model to argue that, you know, we've,

Both parties have done this, but we framed immigration the wrong way in this country for a very, very long time. Immigration should be its own department or it should fall under commerce or it should fall under some sort of economic imperative, not homeland security, because the framing of it is that it's a security issue and it's fundamentally an economic imperative. And even some people disagree with that. I think it's the way the immigration happens, right? It's legal immigration or illegal immigration. Right. But what we need is a lot of it.

Right. We have to figure that out. That should be for us to decide. If we had a proper system for immigration, which, again, we've not had for a very long time, we would be having a different discussion. Right. Countries like Canada, which have a proper system for immigration, don't sit there and don't worry about immigration.

illegal immigration in the same way because they don't think of that as the defining characteristic of an immigration policy. They also don't have a border with a Southern country like we do. Yeah, I'm not sure because, because a lot of the immigrants who come in from our Southern border are not from those places, right? They're from most immigrants who are here illegally in America are still visa overstays, right? Certainly in the last couple of years, we've had a very different border situation and, and,

We should deal with that, right? If you have a door to your house, it should lock. You can choose to keep it unlocked. You can choose to keep it open, but you should have a door with hinges that lock. I was going to say in Europe, they have a similar problem, though, because they don't really have a border between Africa and Asia. They're open borders, basically. In Europe, what they have, like Poland, for instance, with these Ukrainian refugees, historically, the Poles and Ukrainians don't get along that well, but they've got exactly what we have.

a labor shortage, right? Germany, you get into a car in Germany, a cab. It used to be that it was a, generally speaking, a Turkish immigrant. Now it's not because that Turkish immigrant has had a child who is now your doctor or your lawyer or your pharmacist. In America, we can't get enough people into engineering school and med school because we don't issue enough visas. But they have issues as well. They have been for the past, you know, eight, nine, 10 years. I mean-

The war in Syria, they've had tons of immigration. They have refugee camps in Greece. But it's still fed by fear, right? It's fed by... Hungary is the best example where, you know, Hungary, nobody speaks... Hungarian is a language unto itself. It's not like any other European language. So Orban has for close to 20 years now spread the fear that if you let immigrants in,

they will speak a different language. You'll have to learn a different language. Your language will crumble. Hence, your culture will crumble and there'll be no Hungary. Sounds like someone I know. Right, right. It's a tried and true thing. The fact is...

In Western countries where women are now more than half of the university graduates and at least half the workforce, you're not having enough children, right? Hungary is offering that on your fifth child, after you have four children, if you have your fifth child, you will not pay income tax for the rest of your life.

Right. And people aren't going for it because because they don't want a fifth child or a fourth child, in some cases, not a third child. Right. So we don't have we've got declining workplace workforce rates all over the West. There's no there's no way around this. We're going to have to have immigrants and there's no way around migration because migration is the way of the world. It always has been. You and I are both children of people from other places. So we you we don't have to be sophisticated. We can make choices.

about what that looks like, but we have allowed ourselves to be governed by the fact that this is a security threat from the southern border. It's not that that's not true. It's just that that's a portion of the story. It's the land migration and the sea migration that's happening. Not, you know, you came, your family came over with Ibiza, right? Yeah.

They did. To a country that actively welcomed refugees and immigrants. My family came over from chain migration. That's how my family came over. Yeah, but what it has done is it has created a world in which America is getting a reputation as a place that doesn't like immigrants.

Right. And when Donald Trump had a Muslim ban, I remember hearing from the Canadian universities, the best thing that ever happened to them because they couldn't get applicants to consider. And these are top end. The people we banned from Yemen and Syria. What do you think we were getting? Like olive grove farmers? We weren't. We were getting Ph.D. students, engineering people like that. And they went to Canada to get to this.

Right. So so we've just in trying to fix a problem, we're going to create a situation where we've gone from we are the place that the number one place immigrants want to go to in the world by a long shot, America.

But once you lose that, you really lose it. And there are a whole lot of people looking at America saying, you keep on messing this up. Good for us. We'll get the cream of the crop. We'll get our pick. And you need everybody. You need people to pick your vegetables all the way up to being your pH. Oh, absolutely. And we're good at that in America. But we are... This is really...

we have made this into the wrong problem, right? If you care, if you're worried about immigration, you're worried about the economy, you're worried about inflation, then we need good immigration policy and you can fix a whole bunch of those things. Now to your original point, and that is,

Can you convince people that voting for democracy to save democracy is an imperative? That's a heavy lift. But you can apparently convince people that when they go to take away your reproductive rights, which is a form of of the erosion of democracy, they are turning out for two years in red states and blue. People have turned out to protect democracy.

a democratic right. But those are often special elections and ballot measures. And so they really, they activate a certain type of voter and activist. And people don't usually go out to vote to have a right taken away from them. In about half of the cases we've seen, they've been special elections. And the other half, they've been in regular elections. So the question, you're asking the right question. What's motivating what? Is the question about a

abortion motivating lots of people to come out and vote? Are activists voting? And I'm not sure, because if you look at Ohio, where they really tried to motivate the other side to come out and vote, they did everything possible to suppress the vote and to make it go one way or the other. It didn't work. It's not worked anywhere. So I wonder whether when you take democracy out of the abstract and

And I don't say to you democracy is at risk, but I literally just talk about a specific right, whether that's more motivating. We've seen that with with with

racism. We've seen it with voting rights. We're seeing it with abortion like we've seen it with no other topic in the last few years. You don't see it as clearly, for instance, in climate. It'll be very interesting to see how much of the war between Israel and Gaza, or at least how people see the Biden administration managing that, turns out it's many months away. So that may have worked itself out by then. So I'm not sure what the cause and effect are.

This episode is brought to you by Jersey Mike's Subs. Jersey Mike's uses only the highest quality meat sliced right in front of you, piled high with the freshest toppings. It is a Jersey Mike thing. My favorite is number 13, the Italian. Love the Italian. I'm half Italian. I like Italian subs. I especially like Italian subs made in good places. Like Jersey Mike's, planning your summer picnic, backyard adventure, or beach day? Well, Jersey Mike's. They have you covered with everything you need to beat the summer heat.

They have your favorite summer sub combo. They have everything you want at Jersey Mike's. A sub above. Order on the app today or visit jerseymikes.com to learn more. Great app, by the way. This episode is brought to you by Experian. I don't know if you've ever looked in your subscriptions on your phone and noticed that you had like four or five subscriptions. Maybe you didn't realize you were still paying for, or maybe you got some email for something and you're like, I thought I canceled that. Well,

This is what happens. These days, anyone could be missing out on savings from subscriptions they've totally forgotten about. It's not just the ones you forgot to get rid of, it's the ones that they have better deals. And that's where Experian comes in. It's like a personal assistant for your subscriptions. It can cancel over 200 plus subscriptions in categories like streaming services, meal kits, entertainment apps, and more. You could save an average of $270 per year

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You know, you were inspired to write this book after covering the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis, and you were one of the first people on the ground. And you were actually shot at by rubber bullets in your leg. And it just reminded you that democracy is worth fighting for. So can you tell me a little bit more? And, you know, do you empathize with these students who are protesting over the war in Gaza? Are they just exercising their democratic right right now? Or do you think this is violent and over the top? So...

let's start with the idea that you and I both came to where we are talking about politics from different places. We were reporters in different ways, right? We took our, we were reporters and, you know, people often tell you as a reporter, wow, what a great job. You've got a front seat to everything that's going on. And what happened in Minneapolis is I realized it's not a front seat. We're in the arena. We're in it. And, and,

If society depends on an electorate that is informed, that's on us, which means we are warriors for democracy. That's not a partisan statement. It doesn't mean you're a Democrat or Republican. It just means we believe that hurricanes that kill people are bad. Homicides are bad. Democracy is good. And access is important from all types of politicians and people in power. So on that front, that is what motivated me to sort of lean into this conversation about democracy.

I write about protest a lot. I am the child of protest. I literally my grandfather was was educated in a protest movement. Protest is what got South Africa its freedom. Protest is what got India its freedom. Gandhi left South Africa in 1913, thinking he had failed in his experiment only to leave India to independence in 1948.

Some protest is violent. And there are places in the world where the violence in the protest led to outcomes that may not have been foreseen. In Northern Ireland, I mean, it was violent. There's no question about that. South Africa, Mandela was the leader of the armed wing of the ANC and was named a terrorist in the United States.

I believe until after he was president. I think he had to get a waiver to come to the United States after he was democratically elected the president of South Africa. So I think violence always has to be considered in context. But not in like the January 6th context, because that's a fine line. All of its context, right? There is a part of me that...

that wonders about the people who participated in January 6th in a violent manner who were duped into believing that they were doing so for the preservation of their democracy. It's not a legal argument at all. Because they believe the election was stolen. I'm not sure that if you believe the election was stolen, violently storming the Capitol was the answer. But I also think that it's too easy for us to say that there's a clear line between violence and not violence. Again,

Gandhi was a peace-loving guy. He said, if they hit you on one side, you turn the other side. That's how my family grew up. But I have been involved in a lot of protests in my time. I don't think I would prefer if protests are not violent, but I understand why they become violent. And I think it's important for us to understand that when people have no other options and violence is what they turn to, that is a piece of context. Now, when you go back to January 6th or you go back to university campuses, are you out of options? Is

Is violence your only option at that point? That's stuff that we have to look into. I'm not in favor of violence for the sake of violence, wanton violence. But I do understand that in the world, there are times where people feel like all of their avenues have been cut off. All of their avenues for redress have been cut off. Justice does not apply to them the same way it applies to others by virtue of your religion, your color of your skin, your status.

And then they turn to violence. Again, this is not a justification of violence in protest in any way. It is just an argument to say, sometimes violence has context within these things that we need to consider. I would rather we don't live in a society where we have violent protests. We have a first amendment, which is amazing, right? We have a way of protesting without violence. And violence can lead to mobs and mobs can lead to really bad stuff. But

So it's the answer I give that's unsatisfying on this topic. But I do think one always has to consider what is driving people to this and what's our failure in society if we are living in a place where we feel people are driven to violence. The same thing with these people immolating themselves, right? I can't imagine such a thing.

But it causes me to think, why would you do that? Why would you set yourself on fire in protest? Are you out of all other options? Now, I don't believe in the United States that when people do that, they're out of all other options. They feel like they're not being heard, essentially. That's why they become violent. And the Arab Spring started with a fruit seller in Tunis who set himself on fire. And he started a... He died, but he set off a big moment that...

might have led to some democracy. It didn't in the end. So this is, you know what I mean? It's complicated. I don't know how to think about this. It's interesting that they're calling the chaos in America, the spring of unrest, as if like we are having our own Arab spring in the U.S. And there is a lot of political danger for Biden, especially, you know, at these commencement speeches. We've got the convention in Chicago. It's everyone is referencing the 1968 convention also in Chicago.

where there was protesting outside and it was violent. You know what? It doesn't seem like we're getting any closer to a ceasefire, maybe. Yeah. And look, it's one of those things that's going to turn on a dime, right? We will...

Might happen real fast. And I truly hope it does. I mean, I was in Israel on October 8th. I went there right after the war broke out. And I spent the week talking to families of people who were either had been on these kibbutzim in the south or had family who were taken hostage. Spoke to one man who didn't learn until a month later that his mother was not a hostage. He thought she was and she had died.

Oh, wow. This is the worst story I've ever covered. And I cover a lot of bad stories. You know that. I mean, this is unfortunately that the part of my job is that most of the stuff I get deployed to is bad. By definition, it's a school shooting. They always send you to the war zones. Correct. They really do. I used to be a simple business reporter. I used to love interviewing people about their... And so this one's really, really, really bad. This is a bad story on all levels. And I so pray that it ends...

soon. But you have seen something that a lot of our viewers and listeners and readers don't always see. There are vocal protests at almost every political speech in this country now. People protesting about Gaza. People are protesting outside of the Trump trial. Yes, correct. And so this is a political issue. I'm assuming that what the Biden administration is thinking, and you probably know much more about this than I do, they're thinking that

If we can at least try and solve the underlying problem, which is the war in Gaza at the moment and the hostages, other things, other pieces of political success can flow from that. So let's devote 100 percent of our energies to that. And I believe they're doing this. I don't they're not meeting with remarkable success. And I think that frustrates people because America is such a large supplier of military aid to Israel that you would think we would have.

much more influence over the outcomes than we seem to be having. And that's a political issue. And that's Biden and that's Netanyahu. And that's going to have to be sorted out. I'm thinking that they're hoping that if this settles soon, there will be some time to try and rebuild that political currency. But you've seen the numbers as well as I have in Michigan, in Wisconsin, in other places where people showed up to vote to express their dissatisfaction. Democrats with Joe Biden in numbers far in excess of what

He won in what he won by in those states. And a lot of these voters say they'll never vote for him. I mean, that's what they say. And primaries are different than elections. And they're messaging. Yeah. Yes. There's a consequence in a primary. And when you're mad about

policy issues, you do have to consider in a binary environment what voting for the other guy or not voting is going to do. But Michigan has a history of choosing, you know, voting for third party candidates that end up swaying the election, as we know. I would love that we actually had a real third party in America. Like, I think some countries work better with a few, a little bit more, you know,

partisan options than we have in the United States. Because then they become coalition governments and it just becomes... Correct. Minority governments, coalition governments. Canada at one point went too far. I think we were going to five or six sort of mainstream parties. Italy is an example where it doesn't work. Israel is another example where it typically doesn't work. But three might be a nice number for America, but we don't have an infrastructure that's based on three. So we have two and spoilers.

And it doesn't ever work for us. So I don't want to tell any American that their position on something is not valid. But I do hope people think strategically that if you are mad about Biden, whether it's about Israel, Gaza or climate or what have you.

Just understand what your what options you're going to be landed with. But it's much more satisfying to say I withheld my vote and that's why he lost an election than just saying I voted for so-and-so. I just, you know, people have to make that choice for themselves. That's the the upsides and the downsides of democracy. You could actually send a very clear message.

And you could end up with a different situation on your hands. Right. Hans Nichols of Axios wrote something this morning, and it's pretty simple observation, but he writes, the protests are a brutal reminder that America has not snapped back to the normalcy Biden promised in his 2020 campaign. And I do think that that's going to be an issue for him. I think that, you know,

Everyone was tired of the chaos under Trump, right? COVID, the Black Lives Matter protests, Charlottesville, the racial intensity. And this feels like chaos. It feels like chaos. And it's like, I think that that's hurting Biden because he was supposed to be the force that tempered this all, right? You talked about the soul of America, right? And the point of the soul of America is that we have some commonality.

And let's use that as the basis. We can disagree. We should disagree on politics forevermore. I don't really I don't get why the other guys, the you know, you got to take them down. We should be in a society that that allows for reasonable debate. This has eluded us. And I don't know. I don't know whether this is still the hangover effect from from the 2016 election and from Donald Trump or it's covid or.

or it's just, as you say, a time of reckoning for America. I totally get it. For people who feel like there's chaos, and what happens in countries where there's chaos is people often cast a ballot for the person who promises to end the chaos. And while that was Joe Biden, it's more associated with strongmen.

right? It's more associated with people like in the Philippines or Venezuela, where people sort of say, I'm going to crack down. And I understand the appeal. I don't agree with it, but I understand the appeal that I'm going to come in and I'm going to make this, I'm going to sort this all out. And Donald Trump did do this in 2020 as it related to the Black Lives Matter protests, right? He did talk about the ways in which he shut it down and the ways he would shut it down as president. It didn't work for him in that election, but

People in the world do tend to get attracted to this hard line approach. Right. And it's interesting because I just had Trump's pollster on the show last week, and he mentioned that, you know, Trump's numbers were really low, but they started rising, his favorability rising when...

Guidance started to drop off after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Another moment of chaos, I think, when people were thinking that, you know, this was supposed to be reliable Joe. And they're seeing chaos in the Middle East in a, you know, in a country that we've been invested in for. In fairness, in Afghanistan, it was it was Trump imposed.

chaos, but it went down in the, like, what happened? You guys not know that we were leaving Afghanistan? Like, it was definitely, I remember the morning it happened, thinking, how is this possibly happening? We've known for a long time that the Taliban are taking over. Why is this, why is this, why are people running and hanging off of airplanes? The optics are hard. The optics on this are hard. If you're looking for calmness, and look, I've always thought presidents,

get too much blame for things that work well and work badly and take too much credit for things that work well. So I don't know that it's the president's to solve, but to the extent that a voter thinks it is, that works against Joe Biden at the moment. I do want to get you on one last thing on your expertise, the economy. So the Fed is expected to hold interest rates steady.

It's annoying people amid this very stubborn inflation. But Bloomberg is reporting that they will delay any sort of decision until September, which could be like an uncomfortable moment in the middle of the election year. What do you think about that? So we thought we were going to get three interest rate cuts this year. The smart money says...

we might get two and probably get one. Obviously, if interest rates come in September, that would benefit Joe Biden a great deal. Fed chairs tend to like to be cautious about doing things. I mean, they are independent, even though Donald Trump has, there's been a paper floating around that suggests that under Trump presidency, he'd be on the Federal Reserve Board and would be consulted on interest rate cuts, which is a remarkable departure from how the world does these things. But the point is,

If Jerome Powell lowers interest rates close to the election without having done it otherwise, there will be allegations that he is doing that to help Joe Biden get reelected. That said, part of the problem that the Fed's got is they want inflation to be around 2%.

It's actually not the right number. The right number is probably closer to three. Most of the world has moved to three. The United States should have moved to three, but it didn't. And then you can't move the goalposts in the middle of an inflationary environment because that looks like you're giving up, right? Saying, oh, three is where it's supposed to be. So we're good with that.

So it's not actually the right goal, but you'd have to get below 3% inflation in order to make a policy decision that now we're going to say two and a half is okay or three is okay. So we're trying to get to two and it's hard. It's just hard to get there. And unlike recessions, which you and I have both been through, we know how to solve a recession. You drop your interest rates, you stimulate the economy, and it always works. 100% of the time, there's a formula. We

We don't have inflation all that much, and we don't really know how to solve it all that easily. So the Fed, in my opinion, has done a really good job at not letting this get away from them. I would like interest rates to be lower, but I would really like that the Fed doesn't let inflation get away from them because as politically difficult as that might be for Joe Biden, runaway inflation wrecked Japan. Japan, when you and I were growing up, was the big economy. They were going to be the...

the biggest thing in the world. Now they're also rampant. They're like how we talk about China or what China could have been. Obviously, they're dealing. Right. When I was a kid, you didn't talk about China the way you talked about Japan. All the good things were made in Japan. Japan, people learned Japanese in school. New York was full of Japanese bank branches, not actual branches, but outposts of Japanese banks. Inflation wrecks the world. So

I actually think the Fed should be cautious. They didn't say no interest rates. They just said, we're struggling with this. It'll be later this year. I'm fairly confident it'll be later this year. And again, we're at... You get a mortgage now, it's about 6-ish, 6%. It's really high compared to the 3 and 2s that people were getting a few years ago. But historically...

The world doesn't stop when you have 6% inflation. The market's not really moving, at least the real estate market. It does affect the real estate market very negatively. If you have a place and you're locked into a 3% mortgage and you're on a 30-year mortgage, life is fantastic for you. Right, right. You're trying to rent?

It's a hell of a problem. If you try to get a mortgage, you want to be a first-time buyer, that's a hell of a problem for you. But wages are going up. So as long as wages are going up more than inflation is going up, which is where we are right now, you can survive. What we had in the beginning of this inflationary cycle was inflation way up and wages not going up. So at least you've got the right combination. If you had a situation where for 15 years wages went up and prices went up, you'd end up as Norway.

It's not terrible. It's just expensive. We have to just make sure that that pattern continues. Wages increase more than inflation. And at the moment, we're actually there. Okay. Some positive news to end this wide-ranging conversation off. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Everyone needs to go out and buy Ali's book. It comes out on May 7th. It's a Tuesday called Small Acts of Courage, A Legacy of Endurance, and the Fight for Democracy. Thanks so much for being on the show, Ali. Thank you for having me. I've always enjoyed our conversations.

That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Christopher Sutton and Connor Nevins. If you like this show, please share it with your friends, subscribe and rate it. If you like my reporting, please go to puck.news slash Tara Palmieri and sign up for my newsletter, The Best and the Brightest. You can use the discount code Tara20. I'll be back on Tuesday.

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